I am nothing but I must be everything.
Karl MarxRead
Revolutions are the locomotives of history.
Interpretation
Revolutions drive significant changes in society and history.
This quote by Karl Marx suggests that revolutions are powerful forces that propel societies forward, similar to how locomotives move trains. It implies that significant transformations in human history often come about through revolutionary actions that challenge the status quo and lead to fundamental changes in social, political, and economic structures.
In practice
In a speech about social justice, one might say, 'As Karl Marx claimed, revolutions are the locomotives of history, pushing us toward a more equitable future.'
I am nothing but I must be everything.
Religion is the opiate of the people.
It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.
To be radical is to grasp things by the root.
Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.
We lost the American colonies because we lacked the statesmanship to know the right time and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep.
It is one of the ironies of this strange century that the most lasting results of the October revolution, whose object was the global overthrow of capitalism, was to save its antagonist, both in war and in peace - that is to say, by providing it with the incentive, fear, to reform itself after the Second World War, and, by establishing the popularity of economic planning, furnishing it with some of the procedures for its reform
My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silence and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated.
The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.
I think one of the great disasters (in military history) is the way that the Second World War has become the defining reference point for every crisis and every conflict.
Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.
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